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There’s a line between vengeance and lunacy and the story of the Mississauga laundry feud crosses it. A man, angered by a neighbour who had knocked down his house and built a bigger one, began a crusade, erecting 15 clotheslines and pinning them with laundry, a Blair Witch Project of knickers, briefs and stockings. It went on for years.

There they hung, blown by winter winds and soaked by summer rain. The nice next-door neighbours, Steve DeVoe and his wife, Joanne, the ones who owned the wrong-sized house, tried to talk to the neighbour (to “reach out,” in sentiment-speak) but it didn’t help.

I don’t know what they would have said anyway. The display was both a cry for help and self-defeating. When you hate your neighbours so much that you buy underpants for purposes of torment, they can’t sell up and move away because no one wants to live next to deranged people whether they’re flying a big flappy flag or not.

Now that the city has passed a bylaw restricting the height, number, placement and angle of clotheslines, the problem remains. It is proximity.

Even detached houses are next to each other. No one is ever as detached as they think they are. An airplane seat with its armrests and unspoken rules is a little sandwich of privacy but it doesn’t feel that way when an oh-my sits next to you. If it isn’t smell or trickling music sounds, it’s a baseball cap or a hairy arm brushing against your perfectly placed and innocent elbow. Suddenly you’re a child again, in the back seat on an interminable vacation, wishing for a replacement family.

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Ambien is an American drug not prescribed in Canada, which is a shame because it knocks you out cold for seven hours. Americans take it when they fly. It is the only cure for airplane proximity.

Airlines are hated because they impose misery without enforcing the rules of proximity. Yes, I’m talking to you, with the huge carry-on, lining up before your row is called. With the Conservative government cutting the number of flight attendants on each plane while allowing undercover cops with loaded guns to fly, proximity is sandpapering every passenger’s nerves.

What if the cop is a Forcillo? (It’s a personal shorthand. There are Forcillos, there are G20s and SlutWalk Sanguinettis, and there are really good smart cops who are, sadly, too distinctive to get a nickname.) Const. James Forcillo is the Toronto cop charged with second-degree murder after he shot young Sammy Yatim eight times. Forcillos on a plane?

There you sit in your tiny slice of seat, sweating, being repeatedly kicked in the back, watching out for Forcillos and longing for unconsciousness.

At work, your cubicle mate keeps saying loudly “How cool is that?” You are living in the movie Office Space. When Peter Gibbons asks his therapist for a drug to knock him out “so that I don’t know that I’m at work,” he’s asking for medical science to cure his awareness of his job’s proximity to his life.

Peter, there is no drug for that, the therapist says, and dies. But you can still try. I don’t know why corporations haven’t woken up to the nightmare of medical marijuana because ill people are going to show up at work stoned and there won’t be a thing HR can do about it.

What do condo dwellers do to irritate their neighbours? An underpants fetish display would simply entertain drivers on the Gardiner and anyway the building manager would tear it down fast enough. Noise would drive neighbours to elevator violence. Condos take the passive out of passive aggression. You can’t build a fence where there’s already a wall.

The only other places where privacy rules are studiously followed are women’s change rooms and my neighbourhood. “Hi,” I said to a woman walking with her dog past my front garden. “Do you like dogs?” she said, puzzled.

“I guess,” I said.

“Do we know each other? Why were you waving at me?”

“Just saying hello. Being friendly. Sorry.” I weeded studiously.

“How long have you lived here?” she said suspiciously.

“20 years. No, 4,000 years. Eleven thousand years.”

But really, I just said “20” and thought the rest of it. For she was proximate and there are rules.

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